All posts tagged Madison Square Garden

James Murphy, right, and LCD Soundsystem performing in Barcelona last year. The band is embarking on a final week of concerts in New York before calling it quits.

Some bands long past their prime refuse call it quits — witness the list of nostalgia acts crisscrossing the country each summer. Few have the foresight or fortitude of James Murphy, who is set to walk off the stage at Madison Square Garden on Saturday night and shut down a band at its creative peak.

Murphy, the frontman and force behind LCD Soundsystem, has set up a virtual cottage industry in New York City since releasing the 2002 single “Losing My Edge,” a song that meshed tropes from rock and dance music and inspired a wave of like-minded local bands. He now runs a studio in the West Village, works as a producer for other artists, releases records on a label he co-founded — all while fronting LCD Soundsystem, until next Sunday morning at least, through three albums and exhaustive world tours.

That legacy may still grow in the future, but Murphy has called time on the band as a live entity following the acclaim heaped on its 2010 album “This Is Happening.” He declined several requests for interviews and has kept a low profile since setting an end date for his band.

The end comes as other prominent groups from the same musical era are either struggling to adjust to the new decade or, like Murphy’s band, bowing out altogether. Recent albums by the Strokes and Interpol, dominant bands on New York’s early 2000s scene, received lukewarm receptions from critics, while the White Stripes declared they were splitting up just a few days before Murphy’s announcement.

Murphy is very much walking away from an act able to draw fans as well as critical accolades. The scramble to attend LCD Soundsystem’s final show at the Garden, which sold out in less than a day, caused consternation for the singer as scalpers snapped up a disheartening amount of tickets. Read More »

Madison Square Garden and tennis, once frequent and successful partners, have grown apart.

There were signs of the frayed relationship during a trip down the sport’s memory lane Monday night, when Ivan Lendl, John McEnroe, Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi played exhibition matches inside what was once a marquee tennis venue.

The public-address announcer advised the crowd of 17,165 people to turn their cellphones to silent, to refrain from flash photography during play and to remain seated except during changeovers. Fans taking their seats for matches at the U.S. Open, held each summer a 15-minute train ride from MSG, aren’t greeted with that sort of Tennis 101.

The arena’s crowded rafters on Monday included banners honoring the achievements of Steffi Graf and Martina Navratilova. But those are raised only during tennis matches, which have become scarce at the Garden since the women’s tour took its year-end tournament from the arena after the 2000 event. The men’s tour moved its own year-end event from MSG after 1989. Read More »

Inge on a bed inside her owners’ room at the New Yorker Hotel on the night before the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show. See more photos.

Inge, the second-ranked female Standard Poodle in the U.S., arrived in New York for the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show with high expectations — and an entourage. WSJ photographer Rob Bennett followed her journey, beginning with the group’s arrival on a private plane, through the competition at Madison Square Garden. Click here to begin the slideshow.

Be sure to return to WSJ’s Daily Fix blog on Tuesday at 8 p.m. for live coverage of the Best in Show judging to conclude this year’s competition. (Read a recap of the first night here). Plus, see more photos from the dog show: Day One | Day TwoRead More »

Ben Jones falls from bull Slim to None during the Professional Bull Riders event at Madison Square Garden on Friday.

Douglas Duncan was like a lot of other first-time New York City tourists. He was wowed by the lights, he was impressed with its inhabitants and he did a fair amount of walking up and down city streets. One major difference: the Texan was bucked off two bulls during his first visit to Manhattan and went to bed Friday as leader of the Professional Bull Riders’ New York Invitational at Madison Square Garden.

Ramsay de Give for The Wall Street Journal

Madison Square Garden transformed for the 2011 Professional Bull Riders New York City Invitational.

After it was over, he told me that he planned to go out and celebrate a little bit. “I love my job, I’m not married and I like to have fun,” Duncan said. But first, he had to go back to the ring and participate in a time-honored tradition of all the riders in the PBR: signing autographs for any fan who wanted one.

I was rookie bull-riding spectator. At Madison Square Garden, where a weekend competition started Friday night, bull after bull bucked their riders and sauntered for a moment before charging at one of the brightly-dressed bullfighters. The rider-less bulls then took a few laps around the ring, violently changing directions before eventually being corralled into the backstage pen.

New Yorkers are somewhat spoiled by the breadth and depth of entertainment we’re offered on a daily basis. A Broadway musical that tourists from the rest of the country might build an entire vacation around can be just another Tuesday night activity for those who live in the Big Apple. But the annual bull-riding weekend at Madison Square Garden reverses the pecking order: an activity regularly available throughout much of the country is a rare spectacle in New York.

The first tip for newcomers: don’t refer to it as a rodeo — a major faux pas.

“This is not a rodeo,” a PBR organizer told me before the event. Read More »

Georges St. Pierre, right, defeated Dan Hardy in their UFC welterweight bout in Newark, N.J. More than one third of the event’s $4 million gate came from New Yorkers, the UFC said.

Thanks in part to scandals embroiling Gov. David Paterson, and severe fiscal shortages unseen since the era of The Warriors, the process of passing the state’s budget has been unusually tortuous, even by Albany standards.

Observers likely have many questions about statehouse democracy inaction in action: Which programs will be cut? Will my child’s school be affected? Will my local library cut its subscription to Horse Fancy? Another, perhaps more ardent group of observers are asking a different sort of question, namely: When can we watch Georges St. Pierre kick the crap out of someone at Madison Square Garden?

The answer could be as soon as this fall. Yet each passing day without a budget agreement makes a mixed martial arts fight at The Garden less likely in 2010. Read More »